#BeNourishdTidy: Creating an organising workstation

So, as part of my #BeNourishdTidy challenge, I want to be a lot more organised. We tend to use the living room sofa and a chest at the end of our bed as dumping grounds. Newspapers, bills, cut out recipes, crossword puzzles… they all build up into piles of crap, which quickly become overwhelming. Rather than sorting them out, I tend to leave them for too long and then, when people are coming round, either desperately try to sort through them, or else just move them wholesale to somewhere out of sight, where they might stay for months. True story, last month we finally sorted out a bag of this kind of paperwork that we had stuffed into the bag when we were showing people around our flat. In March. It’s not good.

So, this is the new plan. On the tidying plan, I have got various tasks spread across the month to sort out these piles of crap in each room. Stuff that has a home should go back to it. Stuff that needs to be filed gets marked as such. Stuff that I want to read (eg: bits of the paper I didn’t get around to at the weekend) get moved to somewhere they might actually get picked up and read. Etc.

And I’ve created this shelf in our kitchen as an organising workstation. We don’t have a magnetic fridge, so I bought some cork from ebay and stuck it on to the back of the shelf. It’s brilliant stuff – you can choose the thickness and then it has a big sticker on the back – super easy to install. I also got the wire baskets for about £2 each on ebay. Peter doesn’t like them, so I think we might replace them with wooden ones eventually, but for now they do the trick.

The left hand one has stuff that needs to be filed and the right hand one has stuff that either needs some kind of action, or stuff that has no home, but which I have termed ‘handy’. So, take away menus and crossword puzzles, at the minute. There’s a job on the schedule for filing, so every four weeks, I’ll just take the entire filing basket upstairs to the filing chest and sort through what’s in there.

Also on the shelf, a post-it notepad for writing lists, a vase full of pens, our meal planner, spare keys, and basically the useful things that I need reasonably regularly, but always think ‘where the hell is that?’. Now the answer is ‘on the organisation station’. It’s SO useful so far, cost around £15 and took about 15 minutes to set up. I wish I’d had something similar for years.

Do you have a similar system? I’d love to see how people organise their paperwork and the stuff that accumulates in their house. How does it all build up so quickly!?